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What do infants need an ownership concept for? Frugal possession concepts can adequately support early reasoning about distributive dilemmas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2023

Denis Tatone*
Affiliation:
Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Vienna, Austria denis.tatone@gmail.com; https://denistatone.wixsite.com/my-site

Abstract

Boyer's model posits that ownership intuitions are delivered by combining input representations of resource conflict and cooperative value, necessary to solve coordination dilemmas over resource access. Here I evaluate the implications of this claim for early social cognition and argue that cognitively frugal possession concepts can be leveraged to the same inferential end, making the ascription of ownership proper unnecessary.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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